Games

31990 readers

4 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Weekly Threads:

What Are You Playing?

The Weekly Discussion Topic

Rules:

Submissions have to be related to games
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No excessive self-promotion
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
No linking to piracy

More information about the community rules can be found here.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

332

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford says his hopes on Epic Store were 'overly optimistic or misplaced' (www.tweaktown.com)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

125 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm genuinely shocked how much Epic poured into the store and it still lacks so much basic features. Sorting games is still extremely barebones, store is filled with NFT/crypto garbage, the store still looks like a college student's first front-end project, and last time I used the launcher to pick up free games (last year), it was still slow as hell. What were they doing in the past 5 years aside from dropping millions on exclusivity deals?

Epic is going to have to prioritize the store and try some new initiatives while also doubling down on earning pivotal exclusives if it is going to have a chance. I also hope other viable competitors arrive.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 114 points 2 months ago (40 children)

I see some larger publishers bemoan the fact that Epic hasn't caught on, but it should be pretty obvious why. Markets that favor the buyer more than they favor sellers will typically attract the largest user base, and the sellers don't have a choice to not sell where the buyers are.

Epic giving away free games is a nice buyer friendly action, but literally everything else they've done, from paid exclusives to poor client experience isn't favorable to buyers. They've created a market that no buyers want to use unless the product is free or literally not available anywhere else.

Giving publishers/devs better cuts is great, but it does nothing for you if all the buyers are on Steam instead.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I want to point out that Valve won't allow games to be sold on Steam and be cheaper anywhere else. With the lower cut Epic takes games could be cheaper there, but Valve uses their dominant market position to force developers to set the same price on other marketplaces if they want to also be on Steam, which is essentially required.

I get some of the hate, but the "fuck Epic" crowd always annoy me. It's such an ignorant position. That said, I don't use the Epic store because it sucks to use. Fuck monopolies though. Steam has too much control. We need competition or we're going to suffer in the future.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

With the lower cut Epic takes games could be cheaper there, but Valve uses their dominant market position to force developers to set the same price on other marketplaces if they want to also be on Steam, which is essentially required.

I've heard that brought up, but I've never seen actual proof of it. It clearly doesn't apply to sale prices though, because other stores basically always have lower sale prices than steam itself.

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments (38 replies)